ABSTRACT
When M. Coué established by the Nancy experiments the power of Autosuggestion in the cure and prevention of disease and the maintenance of health, he was rendering a great service not only to humanity but to religion. He was pointing out, undesignedly, the way in which powerful spiritual influences can be brought to bear on the individual, the way in which the religious life has been unconsciously developed, the way in which it may be more effectively developed, as the principle and method are more clearly understood. It is a way which was empirically known in the Book of Proverbs, in the direct teaching of Jesus, in explicit words of St. Paul. “ Keep the heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life,” is the equivalent in Hebrew for thought-control and thought-working. The “ heart” was to the Hebrew the source of mental activity. Our Lord laid bare the same truth when He showed that the “ heart ” was the spring of good and evil ; evil thoughts were already evil deeds ; want of mind, folly as it is called, was one of the worst moral defects. And the command to fix the attention on whatever is good, and true, and lovely, on virtue and praise, as the best way of avoiding their opposites, anticipates all that has been discovered on these lines.
